Uber Eats for Business lets companies track meal expenses

You’ve just flown in for a conference. It’s late. You order a car to the hotel and realize you haven’t had dinner yet. The hunt for something to eat is on.

More and more business travelers are firing up the Uber Eats app and ordering food delivery. And as of Thursday, instead of tracking the order and submitting a receipt to get reimbursed for the meal, Uber Eats has its own business platform, just like Uber for Business for rides. The new product is called — wait for it — Uber Eats for Business.

It’s the first time two businesses within Uber have come together to form a new product. But it makes sense, with Uber Eats’ exponential growth in its three years of existence. It’s already in 350 cities and a large portion of its orders are already business expenses. Uber said, based on Concur expenses, Uber Eats orders for corporate meals has gone up a whopping 700 percent since 2017.

Eats for Business will be in the Uber Eats app, but will now offer a separate business account to streamline expenses.

The business version of the delivery app was piloted with 100 companies and showed that a lot corporate travel spending is on food and meals.

The deliveries will show up in the Uber for Business dashboard for managers and administrators, so it’ll look familiar to regular users. It’ll clearly display what employees are spending on food.

Certify, an online expense management platform that looked at 10 million business receipts from the past three months, released an enlightening report last week. Its findings showed Uber was the most expensed vendor last quarter in all categories, including flights, hotels, and restaurants, with Starbucks and Amazon trailing closely behind. The average Uber ride was expensed at $26.51. Lyft was $23.51.

The most expensed food delivery company was Grubhub, followed by Uber Eats with just over 25 percent of all Certify receipts for food delivery. The average cost of an Uber Eats meal was $36.51.

Of course, some companies will continue using Uber Eats separately, even if they already use Uber for Business for rides. But Uber is trying to bring together food delivery and business tools with features like restrictions in certain geofenced locations or certain times of day, or limits on spending per meal. You’ll still be able to separate personal meals from work meals. It’s the same UberEats app, after all.